Nemtsov was, until recently, in charge of part of Eksmo's publishing program, and some of the wackiest and nonmainstream international literature appeared in Russian, thanks to the efforts of his team. He is also known as a devoted editor whose style has spawned parodies, something quite unusual for such an uncreative profession. A couple of my own translations were published under his editorship, and I can swear under oath that the parodies were fully justified.
For an inexperienced translator, an editor with such strong views is no blessing, but where a translator can stand his ground (as I hope that I did), Nemtsov's comments were always to the point. He often found faults where I couldn't see them, and though my ideas of correcting them might have been different the text improved as a result.
After a recent new translation of Jane Austen's novels by Anastasia Gryzunova, Nemtsov's longtime colleague, the new Salinger was even more controversial. Salinger, after all, was a cult figure in Soviet times, one of the few "real" American authors who made it through the Iron Curtain. Most of his work was translated by Rita Rait-Kovalyova, whose style and language was praised by many as the best example of current Russian.
Unfortunately, Rait's translations often smooth down Salinger's language and expressions. In "The Catcher in the Rye," she only distorted the image of the main character, but in the short stories the author's intention was sometimes damaged beyond repair.
Nemtsov's translation, on the other hand, is full of curious slang words, which often belong to a dialect or a time frame I cannot identify; even stranger is the mix of vulgarity and archaisms. However, very few critics compared his translation with the original, and even fewer wanted to review Rita Rait's "classical" translation to find that there were a lot of things seriously wrong with it. When translator and critic Viktor Toporov wrote that new translations of foreign prose were unnecessary, he was expressing a universal sentiment. For me, though, this notion is preposterous, to put it mildly. A new translation, with very few exceptions, is a good thing: It makes people think about language and style and time and what is lost in translation, and it encourages readers to learn new languages.
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